Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 15 tasks they've completed, associate these tasks with a matter, quantify the time they've spent completing them, and then manually enter that information into the system. This is tedious work and inevitably subject to human error. It's no surprise that corporate clients sometimes dispute time entries in the invoices they receive. Inefficiency and cognitive drag: The example of email Perhaps the most difficult challenge related to time capture for lawyers is email. Although this is hardly a new challenge, the rapid adoption of email on mobile devices among lawyers only makes the problem more acute and complex. Most matters generate hundreds if not thousands of emails. Lawyers must filter and prioritize their inbox by identifying and qualifying individual emails as urgent, important, time-critical, of peripheral interest, redundant, related to a specific client matter, and so on. They must then review the body of the message, which often contains non-essential information before moving the email into the appropriate folder, sometimes having to choose among more than one plausible filing location. Lawyers repeat these activities dozens of times each day, all the while staying alert to potential compliance issues. Then, at some point, they must reconstruct the appropriate billable time spent performing such tasks for time cards and narratives to substantiate invoices. Whether this activity takes place in a mobile or desktop environment (likely both), it interrupts substantive work and drains cognitive ener from a lawyer who is attempting to stay on task without distraction. Consequently, tasks that are legitimately billable are often forgotten. Conscientious lawyers who try to track that time after the fact are forced to do so manually, consuming more non-billable time in the process, with little or no substantiation. There are, of course, tools to help manage email and time capture, but most of them rely between this recognition and the actual investment in deploying these technologies." Instead of more applications, what is needed is technolo that operates "beneath" existing applications to gather and analyze the information they generate, and continually "learn" from the collected data to forecast the individual and collective behavior of the firm. Such technolo should perform these tasks efficiently, automatically and accurately. This is the promise that artificial intelligence (AI) holds for law firms and legal departments. The future of legal tech is less about building new applications but more about inside of applications that law firms and their clients already use. The costs of distraction If it is not enough for the firm to rely exclusively on the preferences of a corporate law department client to make the decision to adopt AI, consider the real cost of maintaining the status quo – the cost of distraction. The high degree to which lawyers are distracted from substantive legal work is quantified in the Clio 2018 Legal Trends Report, which reveals that lawyers at law firms have an average utilization rate (the percentage of time they spend doing billable work) of just 30%. This means they are able to devote just 2.4 hours to revenue-generating tasks in a typical 8-hour day. "When factoring in the number of billable hours that never make it to an invoice and the amounts forfeited by unpaid bills, the average lawyer earns just 1.6 hours in billable work for their firm each day," the report notes. "If ignored, inefficiency can have a devastating effect on profitability, which is a problem that will only compound day to day, year to year." Where is all that unbilled time going? According to the Clio report, lawyers average an astonishing 1.2 hours per day simply "recording and summarizing time entries." While a significant number of these lawyers are already using time capture applications that digitize the information they enter, lawyers must still recall each of the countless on dated technolo designed for desktop computing, and few have been designed for the rigors and nuances of legal work. Document management systems, for example, can be used to manage emails and "predict" where specific emails should be filed, but their predictions are either often inaccurate or overwhelming. These tools are also not available for mobile devices, which today's lawyers use with increasing frequency to keep up with client- related work. Many lawyers also use business software like Outlook to drag and drop individual emails into folders, but messages can easily be misfiled and critical information is often lost in the process. Some firms also use time capture software that, while much improved from previous iterations, still fails to truly automate time and narrative capture for client-related email. Accuracy in billing and time capture for law firms is critical to preventing revenue leakage. What may be less apparent, however, is that it also engenders client confidence and trust while offering the firm important information for planning and budgeting for future matters. Firms that use AI technologies to automatically extract and report such information enjoy a significant advantage as they seek to establish more sustainable and innovative billing models in their efforts to win new clients and retain existing ones. Data Leakage = Revenue Loss Every minute devoted to client-related work that firms fail to capture and convincingly substantiate is a form of revenue leakage, and those losses can add up quickly. Most firms understand this, but they fail to grasp that most forms of lost revenue are now preventable. Without user intervention, AI technologies like natural language processing, machine learning and data analytics can automatically extract, structure and organize the data that flows through many of the applications already in use in law firms and produce accurate, coherent narratives of how lawyers are using their time. This is the kind

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